CNET First Look

LG 42LH55

Although its overall picture quality falls short of the best 240Hz LCDs, the LG LH55 series offers plenty of picture tweaks and accurate color.

2:22 / August 31, 2009

Transcript

[ background music ]
>> Hi, I'm David Katsmeyer [assumed spelling] from CNET. And I'm with the LGLH55 series. This is the 42 inch member of the series, but there's also a 37, a 47, and a 55 inch version. So gonna have the same picture quality on all of them, so this review will apply to every member of the series. This is LG's 240 hertz LCD, which means that it has a little better motion resolution than a standard 120 hertz or less LCDs. We'll get to that in a little bit. But first the TV's styling. You'll see it's relatively unassuming looking, it's all glossy black around the edge. And then the slight accent that consists of this little kind of see through area on the extreme edges. The TV also includes a matching stand that does swivel, so that's a nice touch. Features on this TV aside from that 240 hertz are pretty extensive. You do get the benefit of massive amounts of picture control. You can go into the expert menus and play around with a wide range of picture settings, including a ten point IRE adjustment. You can even set a target gamma. So all that stuff is really great news for people who like to tweak the television's color six ways from Sunday. And we're among that group, so we really did like those extra adjustments. There is no interactive capability on this TV however, so you can't really connect it to the Internet. But aside from that, it does have excellent connectivity. So on the back panel there are three HDMI inputs, two component inputs, and a PC input. There's also a fourth HDMI on the side. The downside is there's no S-video on this TV, so if you have a lot of S-video Legacy gear you are out of luck. The picture quality on this LH55 series was sort of a mixed bag. We really didn't appreciate that the black levels were relatively light. So if you're watching dark material or in a dark room you'll notice that it's a lot brighter than the black really should be. On the flip side, with all those adjustments the color is very good. We were able to tune in the color to almost perfect accuracy with all those controls. So that was really nice to have. The 240 hertz really doesn't make all that much of a difference. It's really hard to see the difference. For us the blurring isn't really all that noticeable with normal LCDs, so the anti-blur on the 240 hertz isn't a huge deal. We really didn't appreciate that to engage 240 hertz you also have to engaged this de-jutter processing we'd appreciate. On other TVs they do allow you to separate them, but not on the LG.
[ background music ]
That's a quick look at the LH55 series. And I'm David Katsmeyer.

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